Bel Ami: An unworthy vehicle for much talent (3)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

17 March

* Contains some spoilers *

The most ludicrous claim* that I have read about this film (from the Arts Picturehouse's programme booklet, which I didn't look at before my viewing):

[Robert] Pattinson plays the seductive scoundrel with unbounded pomp and a voraciousness that oozes star quality, outshining a top-notch supporting cast that includes Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas.


Nothing to do with being unclear which of the phrases is 'oozing', although I saw no ooze, but the belief that, albeit Pattinson is on screen almost all of the time, that means that he outshines anyone is seriously misguided - just physically, and in poise, tone and demeanour, Uma Thurman, for example, is radiant as Madeleine, and she is the part, whereas Pattinson never quite seems to know what his part is, let alone plausibly play it.

But then, nor do the directors or the writers of the screenplay, which is part of the problem...


As to things elsewhere, I see that Philip French has one of his rather terse 'reviews' in The Guradian*, of which this long sentence (which looks longer in columns, and is as chaotic as mine) constitutes almost one-third (without talking about the film in hand at all!):

In 1947 the former English professor, drama critic and leading MGM producer Albert Lewin wrote and directed a fascinating version of Maupassant's 1885 novel Bel Ami about the upward progress of the charming, untalented journalist Duroy (nicknamed "Bel Ami") in a corrupt late-19th-century Paris where the press are in cahoots with the politicians.


Yet, whenever anyone talks about this novel by Maupassant (and, often enough, reviews or synopses of films that adapt something for the first time often enough skate over the origins entirely), why do I get that impression that no one has actually read the thing...?


End-notes

* Less absurd, but no less bad, is this account (from a free paper's cinema section):

Based on the classic Guy de Maupassant novel of the same name [the poster for the film handily points out 'this fact', though I have no conception whether it is a classic, or why it's not having been called Mr Bean's Revenge matters]. A charming but manipulative Parisien [which, in the film, he isn't since, as he points out to Madeleine (Thurman), they didn't go to where he was brought up when they got married] makes his way up the rungs of the social ladder by bedding the most beautiful and influential women in the city [Ricci, as Clotilde, is beautiful, but not influential; the husbands of the other two are both important, one (Charles) in the newspaper that the other owns, but the women and they are just - and only - the people whom he meets when he is invited to dinner by Charles]. Uncertain and awkward in the beginning [does that change?], he learns quickly [ditto] as he conquers - and breaks - hearts [but only having been lavishly and unequivocally tipped off how to conquer those hearts - and why].

** SOme such!


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